Editorial | The link between guns and deaths

It has been only nine months since the carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., took the lives of 20 children and six adults. The hail of bullets that destroyed them shook a nation, or so it seemed.

We mourned. We rallied. We ? went on with our lives and already all of it - the surfeit of deaths, the gun debate, the failure of Congress to act on sensible gun-control measures -seems so long ago for everyone except for the two dozen or so families who lost loved ones to gun violence that day nine months ago, and except for the thousands more who have lost loved ones to gun violence in this country every day since.

Every once in a while, Americans will be jarred from the business and busy-ness of their own lives with a horrible reminder of the waste caused by gun violence.

It happened twice this week: First, news of an inexplicably senseless killing in Oklahoma, with three "bored" teens accused of the random shooting of an Australian student and ballplayer who just happened to be jogging when the shooters spotted him; then from Georgia, with a school bookkeeper's heroic prevention of what could have been another mass school shooting by an AK-47 wielding man.

At least the Australians are up in arms about what that country's deputy prime minister calls America's "murder mayhem on Main Street." What will it take to get Americans' attention?

Maybe it would be knowing there have been more than 800 Newtowns since last December, that more than 21,000 Americans have died from guns since the Sandy Hook shootings. That includes suicides, murders and accidental shootings. And it includes children.

In January, an infant not even a month old who was shot by his mother in Florida.

In February, a 16-year-old in North Carolina who was shot and killed with a shotgun while playing with his 14-year-old brother.

In March, the 3-year-old son of a Michigan deputy who shot and killed himself.

In April, the 4-year-old boy in Tennessee who grabbed a loaded gun at a family cookout and shot and killed the wife of a sheriff's deputy.

In May, in Kentucky, the 2-year-old girl who was accidentally shot and killed by her 5-year-old brother with a child-sized rifle.

In June, the 12-year-old boy in Ohio who killed himself after shooting his 9-year-old brother in the head.

In July, the 8-year-old California girl who was killed when someone sprayed her apartment complex with gunfire.

In August, the 2-year-old killed by his grandfather in a family argument in Georgia.

"Everyone's shattered," an Australian told CNN about the shooting death in Oklahoma of Christopher Lane.

Americans should be, too, by any or all of the thousands of gun deaths that have continued to happen in our midst and with our permission since Newtown.

But we aren't.

Louisville, Kentucky • Southern Indiana

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Editorial | The link between guns and deaths

It has been only nine months since the carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., took the lives of 20 children and six adults. The hail of bullets that destroyed them shook a nation,